A River in Darkness: One Man's Escape from North Korea by Masaji Ishikawa (audiobook)

genre: memoir

What would it take for a person to risk their life to leave an oppressive country?  I've wondered this often, especially as several groups of political-asylum-seeking refugees have resettled and made new lives in our town.  How bad can it get that dying while escaping is worth the chance?  Well, after reading this gripping and horrible story, I can imagine it.

Masaji was born in Japan but went to his father's home country of North Korea while he was still a child.  And while life in Japan in the period just after the Korean War wasn't easy, it was paradise compared to his new life in North Korea.  It's heartbreaking, how desperate and tragic life experiences are.  I am embarrassed by my ignorance of much of this period.  As he spoke about the famines happening while I was in high school I wanted to cry, imagining what my life was like while he and his family were suffering so much.

This is an important book. Mr. Ishikawa is a witness, a voice crying out his story to the world, validating the horror of life under a dictatorship and the subsequent stratifying of society that left millions to literally just rot.  It's incredibly dark and sad, and not my usual fare at all, but I am glad I let myself to go this hard place, I feel better connected to North Korean history and more compassionate for those who have similarly suffered.   It's not literary, sometimes things feel a bit choppy and his narrative voice is sometimes a bit rough and surely.  I think part of this was in the translation and some of it was just the thick skin you had to grow to survive.

note: adult themes here and some pretty foul language